ATRC Support Hours

Develop Your Own Blackboard Course

Faculty, you can prepare for new classes, even before Palomar provides your course shells! The “early worm” professors are already starting to ask about when the Summer 2014 course shells will be ready; the short answer is “not yet.” However there is no reason to wait – strike while you feel inspired!

There’s this thing called Coursesites.com, you see. A fully featured Blackboard Learn environment which anyone can take advantage of; in fact it’s got all the bells and whistles turned on, some of which Palomar doesn’t even have. But don’t worry, the functions you depend on here will be present and fully functional over on Coursesites.

Not only is the system fairly easy to begin using, there are a number of good instructional videos and documentation on the site, so figuring out what to do won’t be a problem. To start, you’d want to sign up for an account:

After that, you can hit the obvious green button in the middle of the screen to Create A Course. A wizard walks you through the process of setting up your own course shell, and then you can begin populating the course with your own content.

Probably the biggest “how do I do this?” issue on Coursesites will come should you decide to have colleagues or students actually utilize your course shell. Yes, this system is fully functional, and has even been used to run a good number of MOOCs, so having a few other faculty collaborate with you won’t present any technical problems. But the process of sending invitations is a bit unusual; fortunately there’s a video describing the whole process:

That video shows inviting students, but if you read the small print there is a similar link to invite Instructors, too.

So if you’re itching to get developing, and don’t want to wait until your course shells are ready on Palomar’s system, give Coursesites a try. Don’t worry about wasting development work either; anything you build there can be exported and then imported into your course on our system later. Happy course developing!